I remember reading A Modest Proposal at a young age and finding it funny—because our class had the background on the satirical piece itself. Audiences when the piece dropped weren’t so lucky and were quite disgusted by its implications, but the joke might’ve been lost on them, because the author, Jonathan Swift, was an expert satirist.

Just like Gertrude Stein, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) was born in Pennsylvania (Bethlehem to be specific), and she attended Bryn Mawr and the University of Pennsylvania. There, she befriended Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (poetry.org). She ended up living in Europe and traveling abroad for most of her life. She also became heavily involved in the Imagist movement (poets.org).